4/28/2006 @ 9:20AM

Wrap Star

Bubble Wrap, the beloved protector of packages and purveyor of Pop! entertainment, gets a cushion from counterfeiters.

At Sealed Air’s headquarters–a cheerless industrial park hard by Interstate 80 in Saddle Brook, New Jersey–Chief William Hickey sits in a conference room with a playful grin spread across his face. “I love this stuff,” he says, fingering a foot-long sheet of Bubble Wrap, the universally known and beloved product made by his company. He picks out a bubble and squeezes it, eliciting a sharp Pop! “Some people use it as a stress-reliever,” he says, then pinches another. Pop!

You also can put the stuff under your doorway to deter break-ins (the Bubble Wrap burglar alarm) or stuff it in your bra (the Bubble Wrap boob job) or sleep on it (the Bubble Wrap bed). Farrah Fawcett once bundled up in it for a Playboy photo shoot. On various Web sites you can pop virtual Bubble Wrap.

Its intended use, of course, is to protect items during shipping, a mission Sealed Air has pursued for 46 years. It has spawned several low-cost imitators and the ultimate brand compliment–counterfeit Bubble Wrap, made in China and found on sale at a
Home Depot
in Southern California. The company churns out enough Bubble Wrap every year to wrap the equator ten times. The brand is so strong that the company has pondered dropping its own name in favor of Bubble Wrap, even though it provides less than 10% of total revenue. “‘Sealed Air’ does lack a little marketing pizzazz,” Hickey allows, squeezing yet again. Pop!

But even Bubble Wrap needs innovation, and Sealed Air recently unveiled the latest improvement, the result of a 40-year quest: inflatable Bubble Wrap. It had long been a dream of the company’s cofounder, engineer Alfred W. Fielding. “He told me before he died that his real desire was to somehow find a way to put air in the bubble when you needed it rather than when you made it,” Hickey says.

Formally known as NewAir I.B.–and sold at a handsome 20% premium over the old stuff–the new line reduces bulk and consequent shipping costs. One truckload is equivalent to 40 truckloads of the already inflated bubbles of yore. Regular Bubble Wrap arrives in 48-inch-by-40-inch rolls that hold only 250 feet; the new do-it-yourself bubbles arrive uninflated in 16-inch-by-10-inch rolls of flat sheets that hold 1,500 feet. Shippers inflate them as needed on-site. “Our customers have always told us they wanted to save space,” says Hickey.

Bubble Wrap, an unnatural resource of New Jersey, was invented in 1957 by Fielding and engineer Marc Chavannes. They sealed two shower curtains together, capturing some pungent Jersey air in a smattering of bubbles. Their vision? Wallpaper. (The Beat Generation had dawned in the U.S., and funky wall coverings of bamboo and such were the rage.) When that didn’t fly, they hawked it as greenhouse insulation. And though Bubble Wrap is translucent and does an okay job holding heat, that plan didn’t work, either.

Company legend holds that a few years after Sealed Air was founded in 1960, an innovative marketer named Frederick W. Bowers finally found the true value in the cellular bubbles. IBM had just launched the 1401, one of the world’s first mass-produced business computers. Bowers showed IBM how Bubble Wrap could protect the 1401′s fragile innards in transit. “Serendipitously, Bubble Wrap and vacuum tubes met,” says Hickey.

Bubble Wrap first had to take on balled-up newspaper, no easy sell because that packing material was essentially free. Then it went up against those insidious polystyrene peanuts, which popped up in the 1970s. Bubble Wrap is a better protector than either, but Sealed Air must constantly sell potential customers on its superiority.

Packaging engineers run the sales force. The bubble-heads have set up 35 labs where they woo prospects with demonstrations of packages being dropped on concrete floors, vibrated as if they were on the back of a truck driving over cobblestones or placed in vacuum chambers to see how the bubbles respond to altitude. In 2000 Sealed Air even entered a pumpkin-dropping contest in Iowa, releasing an 815-pound pumpkin–nicknamed “Gourdzilla”–onto layers of Bubble Wrap, from a 35-foot-high crane. “The pumpkin survived the drop,” Hickey says. “The problem was that it bounced.”

Sealed Air actually makes most of its money from food packaging, the result of its $4.9 billion acquisition of WR Grace’s Cryovac unit back in 1998. That segment, which includes shrink bags, laminated films and absorbent pads, now accounts for 62% of sales. But the Cryovac deal forced Sealed Air to pay $850 million for asbestos lawsuits in 2002; claimants said they had “successor liability” in suits pending against Grace itself, even though the Cryovac unit hadn’t used or made asbestos products. Sealed Air’s stock, which had fallen to $13 in October 2002, has since recovered to a recent $57.

Last year Sealed Air’s net income grew almost 20% to $255 million, on 8% sales growth to $4 billion. With just over half of its revenue coming from overseas, the company is well positioned to cash in on emerging markets such as China and India, says Amanda Tepper of JPMorgan. Bubble Wrap traditionally has been a low-tech play on high tech. The new stuff should help beat the counterfeiters.

Sealed Air constantly works on bettering Bubble Wrap (the original patent lasted until 1985, thanks to revisions). The key: strengthening of the bubble. The original polyethylene layer was permeable but now is coextruded with nylon and is ten layers strong. The company spent $76 million on research and development last year (2% of sales, twice the industry average). Much of that was funneled into the protective-packaging segment, which includes Bubble Wrap, Jiffy mailers, Instapak foam cushioning and Fill-Air inflatable packs.

Three Sealed Air engineers had toiled since the late 1990s to deliver the inflatable dream of founder Fielding, who was a director of the company until 1987. When Hickey took over as chief executive in 2000, after 20 years at the company, he made the flat-bubble breakthrough his personal mission. The team tried to blow up the bubbles chemically and through infrared technology, but decided neither was commercially viable.

The biggest hurdle was that the plastic had to be strong enough to hold the positive pressure of air pumped in, says Michael Metta, Sealed Air’s technology chief. Another problem: how to heat-seal the sheets without compromising the bubble. They ended up going back to the way they had made the Bubble Wrap of old.

It starts with BB-size pellets of polyethylene that are fed into a long, cylindrical extruder and heated to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The tiny beads flatten out to form ten layers of sheets 15 microns thick, which are stacked and cooled to 100 degrees.

In regular wrap the sheets are sealed together to capture air in individual bubbles. With the new inflatable kind the sheets, made from a stronger polymer, are collapsed to form rows of seven uninflated bubbles connected laterally.

Shippers feed the sheets into a 3-foot-high machine that they lease from Sealed Air for $500 a year. Air is injected into the bubble rows by a squeaky pneumatic pump, then the sheets are heat-sealed on one edge. The machine can produce 21 feet of the new Bubble Wrap in a minute. “It was sweet when it worked,” says Metta. Sealed Air holds three patents on the new stuff.

So far, 200 companies, including
Watson Pharmaceuticals
, Motor
Coach
Industries and Marshall Field’s, have signed on to use the new Bubble Wrap. The U.S. Navy, which uses Bubble Wrap to protect everything from jet parts to navigational equipment, likes the flat sheets because they occupy less space on its transport ships. Hickey admits inflatable Bubble Wrap will cannibalize some sales but doesn’t fret about it.

He sees only one problem with the new wrap: You can’t pop it. Press on one bubble and the air merely flows down the line to another.

Says Hickey: “I guess we’ll lose some of the entertainment value.”

By the Numbers

Air Supply

Bubble Wrap provides less than 10% of Sealed Airs revenue, but it is such a beloved icon that the company mulled adopting it as its name. Rapid growth in global trade and demand for food packaging have been driving earnings.

.75 inches, the height of a bubble in the new inflatable version of Bubble Wrap. Regular bubble is half an inch high.

10 Number of times the annual production of Bubble Wrap could circle the Earths equator.

815 pounds, the weight of a pumpkin that survived a 35-foot drop onto layers of Bubble Wrap.